Pop goes the Weasel
Joy: Alan Bennett's Diary in the LRB
For Emma
15 December. My best Christmas cards are always from Victor Lewis-Smith, who lives in the Lake District, not far from Sellafield: ‘I persist in telling visitors on the fell that the building they can see in the distance is in fact the Kendal mint cake factory, whose chimneys are emitting exotic mint vapour. It’s for the best, it really is.’ - Alan Bennett
Vol. 32 No. 1 · 7 January 2010
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Joke # 8
A man spies his wife in front of the full length mirror in the bedroom
"Mirror mirror on the door, make my bust a forty four", she says.
Her boobs grow to a fabulous size.
The man, thinking two can play at this game, waits until she is out.
"Mirror mirror on the door, make my cock touch the floor", he says.
His legs fall off.
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New Tube Map showing the @ Line
(download)
The river is back, and welcome to the @ Line (once known as The Circle Line).
See all the maps at Transport For London - http://www.tfl.gov.uk/gettingaround/1106.aspxComments [0]
Song of the Day: Papercuts - White Are The Waves
White Are The Waves by Papercuts
More from Papercuts at: http://pitchfork.com/artists/5127-papercuts/
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Style Guide: Travel Eye Mask by Otis Batterbee
Beautifully made eye masks (I have the Pistachio Corduroy & Shirt Check styles, above) which are lavender-filled and have a russet coloured cotton velvet backing. My flat has copious amounts of light flooding in on even the dreariest of days, which is very welcome but does present a problem when one would rather doze in the morning. I'm not a fan of blackout blinds, let alone *shudder* curtains, so these lovely eye masks are a perfect way to get a little extra sleep.
Classic British Style online from Otis Batterbee. I also heart the mood board they have on the site.
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Style Guide
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New Crush: The Blake Wright
All illustrations from The Blake Wright. Thanks to Jane Aldridge (@sea_of_shoes) for the link.
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Crush
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Race Report: Run Richmond Riverside 10K
On the coldest morning of the year since late March, some one thousand of us are standing by the Thames towpath in Ham, upriver from Richmond Bridge. Around 700 are competitors, the rest spectators and officials of the Run Richmond Riverside 10K. We're all somewhat cold, nervous, excited even.
I'm also, along with nerves and excitement, slightly relieved. This is the last race of my nominal 'season', a completely arbitrary period of time the beginning of which was marked by a race back in February of this year, the first time I'd competed since 1991. The relief comes from having stayed free of any serious injury throughout these 8 months while running 5K & 10K races at regular intervals and surviving two half-marathons. There was one avoidable and stupid injury to my calf, which came about after running one morning following a great deal of wine the previous night (dehydration cramp which I then aggravated to a grade 2 tear by running a 10K the following weekend. Like an idiot). It's easy to spot the point where this occurred on the race chart below.
There are two broad categories of road races - the first, traditional male-dominated sport that I wrote about here - and a more modern, charity-centred and female dominated one such as today's race, run in aid of the Macmillan Cancer Support. The defining feature of the latter type of event, it strikes me, is the preponderance of inflatable sticks that can be bashed together to create noise while displaying the sponsors logo, and the large dense foam hands that children especially love waving.
Today's run will take us a short distance up the towpath towards Richmond, around some cones then back past the start and out towards Kingston with the river for company all the way before looping back after Teddington Lock. The advantage for the spectators is they get to see the athletes not only at start and finish but also once we're a little strung out around the 2K mark, in a tidy procession of relative ability. In particular spectators appreciate competition amongst those bringing up the rear, and those final bursts of energy that lead to sprint finishes are warmly applauded.
With this many people jostling in a confined space I'm taking no chances, and stand in the front row for the start, with a handful of others who will form the lead pack. "Ooo, we've got some serious runners here" laughs the girl with the microphone, before leading the majority in a synchronised warm-up minutes before the start. The front runners stand around shaking their legs in time-honoured fashion, and bouncing up on the balls of their feet; more a sign of nervous energy as much as a useful exercise. We all have electronic chips on our ankles that will be triggered by the large blue mat that we cross at start and finish (during a recent half-marathon they had placed a mat mid-course at the 10K mark, though the split time it gave was nonsense according to my watch).
The start, despite the technology is a farce, the amplified girl shouting "Go" after suddenly announcing it's almost time to begin. The first fifteen of us sprint clear of the pack, and I keep up the overly fast pace for the first kilometre until settling back into my race pace by the time I head back through cheering spectators. After 4K I'm averaging 4 minutes 10 seconds per kilometre, which one might say was as planned, if hasty calculations on the train down here count as planning.
The river path, aside from a small section around the lock is gravel and stones and your feet slide around just slightly - it's not as uncomfortable as when running on cobbles but when full traction returns on one short section of concrete there is a noticeable increase in pace from the four or five runners around me. By this time the leading female runner is in the pack alongside me, and for the remainder of the run my race is a competition between just a handful of people. We get to the 9K marker (markers 7 and 8 both having gone AWOL, so I'm unsure of my pace now) at 38 minutes, and everyone finds an extra few inches to their stride. The path is firm underfoot, and I'm running as fast as at the start, just a few metres behind the girl from Woodford Harriers who wins the women's race. We both finish in 41:37, which is 20th place for me, a new personal best at that distance and overall second in the veteran categories.
For a long period of one's running life you are counted as a senior runner, an undifferentiated mass. Then, after your fortieth birthday it's back to small age group ranges, similar to when you first start out as a teenager and, just like then you are in line to win age-related categories. Added to that is the very useful introduction of the WAVA percentage, which compares your time over standard race distances to the world record holder for your age. You can see my WAVA table for this season's best performances below.
The WAVA stats are sometimes used to decide the 'true' winner of a race, allowing for the inevitable decline in aerobic fitness as one ages. It enables a seventeen year old and a seventy year old to compete equally. Rather more interestingly, from a personal perspective it allows me to compare myself with earlier selves. I mentioned at the start that the last time I competed for a season was 17 years ago, and I kept a training and racing diary that year - allocating WAVA percentages to my times for 5K and 10K races back then gives me a useful comparison with my current fitness. The result? I'd probably beat my 30-year old self by a small margin.
Men come up with all kinds of responses to inevitable middle aged crisis; from twenty-something girlfriends to leather jackets, motorcycles to forming pub rock bands or playing soldiers with other men in fields at the weekend. However we show it (and it's a requirement that it be an embarrassment to all but us) the urge is no different than the one so precisely exposed by 'Ten Years Younger'. This season, I turned the aerobic clock back 17 years; as for the 'Ten Years Younger' bit, I'll let you be the judge.
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Race Report
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The Poetry Bookshelf: Shelf Three
You can obtain a larger image by clicking above
- Louis MacNiece & W. H. Auden, Letters from Iceland 1st Edition
- W. H. Auden, Various 1st Editions, Collected Longer & Shorter Poems
- Louis MacNeice, Various 1st Editions inc. The Earth Compels & Autumn Journal
- Robert Lowell, 1st Editions of most of output in both US and Faber imprints.
- John Berryman, Collected poems
- George MacBeth - 1st Editions, some private press
National Poetry Day has prompted a continuation of my bookshelf discussion, and we're onto some heavyweights with Shelf Three. Louis MacNeice is the poet I turn to at this time of year, for empathy and comfort; the only way to deal with miserable travel and adverse weather and shifting seasons, I find, is to celebrate and embrace. Constantly struggling against such things is just too wearisome. His poems begin with "These days are misty, insulated, mute like a faded tapestry" or they help validate one's solipsism with "How I enjoy this bout of cynical self-indulgence, Of glittering and hard-boiled make-believe". Do, please, read Autumn Journal before the month is out - you'll hear the leaves crunch beneath your feet as you sit quietly in your chair.
I want to write about George MacBeth at a later date, as an author as well as a poet so let's look at Robert Lowell's work. I began reading his poems because the first published book by Jonathon Raban was a selection of Lowell's work with a long introduction and some notes by him. Rabun is a favourite author of mine, a travel writer and novelist and friend of the travel writer Paul Theroux (I have a 1st Edition of 'Robert Lowell's Poems' signed by Rabun and inscribed to Theroux and it is a book I'm most fond of).
Lowell sums up his appeal to me when, in an interview he suggested that "people have turned to my poems because of the very things that are wrong with me ... the difficulty I have with ordinary living, the impracticability, the myopia". The intensity of his single-mindedness during the lucid phases in which he would write and endlessly re-write produce words that burn into the mind.
Midwinter in Cuernavaca, tall red flowers
stand up on many trees; the rock is in leaf.
Large wall-bricks like loaves of risen bread--
somewhere I must have met this feverish pink
and knew it's message; or is it that I've walked
you past them twenty times, and now walk back?
The stream will not flow back to hand, not twice, not once.
I've waited, I think, a lifetime for this walk.
The white powder slides out beneath our feet,
the sterile white salt of purity and blinding:
your puffed lace blouse is salt. The red brick glides;
bread for a dinner never to be served. ...
When you left, I thought of you each hour of the day,
each minute of the hour, each second of the minute.
Mexico (V) by Robert Lowell, from Notebook (for Sophie)
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The Poetry Bookshelf
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